Open Access

Techno-economic analysis that allocate costs to the energy flows of energy systems are helpful to understand the formation of costs within processes and to increase the cost efficiency. For the economic evaluation, the usefulness or quality of the energy is of great importance. In exergy-based methods, this is considered by allocating costs to the exergy instead of energy. As exergy represents the ability of performing work, it is often named the useful part of energy. In contrast, the anergy, the part of energy, which cannot perform work, is often assumed to be not useful. However, heat flows as used e.g. in domestic heating are always a mixture of a relative small portion of exergy and a big portion of anergy. Although of lower quality, the anergy is obviously useful for these applications. The question is, whether it makes sense to differentiate between exergy and anergy and take both properties into account for the economic evaluation. To answer this question, a new methodical concept based on the definition of an anergy-exergy cost ratio is compared to the commonly applied approaches of considering either energy or exergy as the basis for economic evaluation. These three different approaches for the economic analysis of thermal energy systems are applied to an exemplary heating system with thermal storages. It is shown that the results of the techno-economic analysis can be improved by giving anergy an economic value and that the proposed anergy-cost ratio allows a flexible adaptation of the evaluation depending on the economic constraints of a system.